Frederic Raphael
AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France
By Ruth Harris (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 542pp £30)
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Horace was right, 'Bis repetita placent': people like to hear the same stories all over again. Why else should Ruth Harris add yet another volume to the fat library of material, ancient and modern, on the Dreyfus Affair? Her justification has to be either that she has new evidence or that her style will refresh the topic. Only a crackpot, counter-factual version of the Affair could argue that Dreyfus really was guilty and that the 'Jewish lobby', in a proto-typical form, perverted the course of justice. A more refined malice would merely wish that 'the Jews' had never succeeded in procuring Dreyfus's vindication, since the consequences weakened France's national unity and self-confidence. They also loosened the authority of the Catholic Church and made scepticism - the occupational tic of 'intellectuals' such as the 1930s philosopher, Alain - into a contagious anti-clerical attitude.
Harris is not tempted to any melodramatic revisionism. She takes it for granted that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason in 1894 and that he was rightly pardoned - after a second court martial conviction - five years later (his conviction was formally annulled only in 1906) and then she looks, with appraising hindsight, at the social and moral deposit of a drama that, once again, divided France in two (in truth, the dotted lines were always there).
The villains are still headed by the real traitor, Commandant Esterhazy, who was said by Dreyfus's loyal brother Mathieu to have had 'the profile of a bird of prey' (just the kind of beak regularly attributed by anti-Semites to Jews), and Colonel, later General, Auguste Mercier, who rigged the evidence and intimidated the squeamish (and who wound up, après coup, being elected to the Senate).
The rabble-rousing Edouard Drumont and the sado-masochistic littérateur Maurice Barrès are seen and heard to gloat yet again over Dreyfus's savage humiliation. Whenever the egregious Commandant Armand du Paty de Clam opens his mouth, the same false notes are struck, but it is chastening to learn that the conniving prig died fighting in the Great War at the age of sixty-three.
The heroes are still Colonel Picquart, who overcame his own anti-Semitic habit to speak out against the Establishment's lies; Ferdinand Forzinetti, the prison governor who, from the start, loudly doubted his prisoner's guilt; Dreyfus's wife Lucie, unflinching and uncowed throughout; Emile Zola, at first reluctant and then the author of the article headed 'J'accuse', which threw fat in the fire; Bernard Lazare, a rabid Zionist without assimilationist reticence; and the brothers Joseph and Salomon Reinach, who had the means and the guts to persist until military 'justice' was undone.
Dreyfus was never the charismatic charmer for whom his supporters might have wished. A native of Alsace, the province that had been lost to Germany a quarter of a century earlier, he was inspired to join the army by the revanchiste patriotism that also animated his enemies. A highly intelligent artilleryman, he worked twice as hard to get half as far as his toffish colleagues. When that scribbled scrap of paper from a German embassy wastepaper basket proved that a spy was passing gunnery secrets to the Germans, Dreyfus was the high command's scapegoat of unanimous choice.
Honest experts said immediately that the handwriting on the bordereau did not resemble Dreyfus's, but for others that merely proved the diabolic cunning to be expected from certain people. When Colonel Mercier sexed up the dossier of evidence to secure a conviction at a hurried court martial, the condemned man reacted to disgrace by a public show of stoicism. In his prison cell, he shrieked and banged his head against the wall, but when the crowd bayed for his blood and he stood 'alone in the universe' (as Barrès noted gleefully), he reiterated his innocence with maddening sang-froid.
Docked of his epaulettes, his sword broken over the knee of a loutish sous-officier, he soldiered on, more shameless, it seemed, than noble. A nice detail, new to me, is that Dreyfus's sword had been broken before the public ceremony and soldered together so that it would snap easily. On Devil's Island, deprived even of a sight of the sea, Dreyfus endured prolonged vicious treatment with a courage that anti-Semites chose to see as insolence.
When his innocence was eventually established beyond all reasonable doubt, it left many people, especially fervent Catholics, in denial. Even among the Dreyfusards, Alfred never became a charismatic figure. His cause rallied the anti-clerical left, but his own lack of radicalism led to accusations of faint-heartedness and, later, of ingratitude. Lacking any ideological antagonism to the bourgeois system, Dreyfus himself was never an enthusiastic Dreyfusard.
Harris is justified in reheating the passions of the Affair by the detailed vividness of her narrative and by tracking the consequences of the Affair all the way to President Chirac's 2006 speech on the centenary of Dreyfus's vindication, which Chichi declared a triumph for the 'humanist values of respect and tolerance'. It is pretty to think so; but Harris reminds us that, in fact, the perpetrators of the cover-up were given immunity and the general amnesty appeased the bigots by smoothing the way to a compromise on the separation of Church and State.
Joseph Reinach's seven-volume collection of relevant papers remains the unchallenged main source, but we are assured that, in the 1960s, 'vital new evidence' revealed 'deceit high and low' and that in 1983 came Jean-Denis Bredin's 'stunning synthesis [linking] military intrigue and parliamentary debate with street violence and the unprecedented polemical war'. I read on carefully, but I have yet to be undeceived or stunned. Are we surprised to find that there was collusion between the officer corps and the deputies who shared their conceits? What is meant by the pleonastic phrase 'unprecedented polemical war'? Whatever pushing and pulling went on, and despite the revolver shot that hit Dreyfus's defending counsel in the back, the Affair was a protracted screaming match compared to the bloodbath licensed a generation earlier by Adolphe Thiers and his friends when they repressed and decimated the Communards.
Harris's knowledge of French social mores is impressive, but is it right to say that 'Cartesian dualism privileges thought over feeling'? Descartes' cogito is commonly translated as 'I think' but it did not exclude sensations. Isn't there, in any case, a tendency to exaggerate the influence (as against the fame) of philosophers in French political life? Rousseau was said to be the literary inspiration of the Revolution, until someone proved that his books were scarcely known and little read by the key players who brought down the ancien régime. Zola's article played a key part in inflaming public opinion because he was a best-selling novelist, disdained for his 'naturalism' by the apostles of elegance.
Harris's essential conclusion is that since the Affair 'the pervasive influence of Marxist ideas and the aura of sanctity surrounding the "intellectuals" ... promote the importance of rationality while obscuring the emotional components of political ideology'. Hence, it says here, we need a 'fundamental rethinking of the struggle between the "intellectuals" and "anti-intellectuals"'.
The intention is bold, but how can it be realised? The rethinking of fundamentals is, by definition, an intellectual exercise. The essence of the anti-intellectual case is rhetorical if not religious; it depends on mystical notions of race, nation and revelation. Not only is there no level linguistic playing field on which to stage the play-off, there are no rules common to both sides by which it might be refereed. It is, of course, always possible to discover that the virtuous have ambiguous motives or that rabble-rousers (Drumont, for egregious instance) suffer from pitiable psychological terrors. But if civilisation is to hold together, fiat justitia, ruat caelum must remain a binding principle.
In order not to be naive, historians are often tempted to clap paradoxical readings on well-known events or personalities. A J P Taylor set the style by turning Hitler into a meta-Bismarck. When Charles Maurras is given as much respectful attention as he receives here, it suggests either concealed partisanship or a version of impartiality scarcely distinct from cowardice. Why, for instance, is it not mentioned that he encouraged a gang of thugs to attempt to murder Léon Blum in the 1930s? If a man is to be forgiven or 'understood' (Maurras was stone-deaf, le pauvre) after publishing the names and addresses of 15,000 Jews so that they could be rounded up and murdered during the Occupation, decency has yielded to deconstructionist nihilism. 'Tout comprendre rend très indulgent', said the unfoolish Madame de Staël.